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There's a line of thought that highly original thinkers can be so biased toward "I can figure it out myself"--that is, they get so many happy brain chemicals fr

There's a line of thought that highly original thinkers can be so biased toward "I can figure it out myself"--that is, they get so many happy brain chemicals from the activity, or whatever--that referential thinking becomes their critical blind spot. Referential thinking involves consulting others' measurements and advice; tide tables fall into that category. Once you build your own navigational mental model and realize you know how to navigate from first principles, as he did, I'm sure it becomes almost intoxicatingly tempting to get out into open water.

walrus01 9y ago
One of the definitions of maturity is knowing when you're in over your head and to consult third party experts. Being intelligent in an abstract sense doesn't magically impart knowledge/training/skills in a field that a person has no direct experience in. For example I have no clue how to sail a sailboat, so if somebody gave me a 30' Catalina tomorrow I would go out and get training on how to sail before trying to discover the techniques from first principles. Watching the British Columbian news for the past 25 years - I could find probably at least twenty instances where random tourists go off into the back country and are never seen again, or are found deceased in a ravine years later by random hikers. You can die in the North Shore mountains within 10 km of North Vancouver pretty easily. Search and rescue missions are a fairly common thing in tourist season. Thankfully boating and kayaking has a bit more equipment/preparation barrier (compared to just heading off into the woods with no map, no GPS, a few Clif bars, wearing sandals, a tiny water bottle and no jacket) so maritime search and rescue is not as common.
ilkkao 9y ago
The author has many other similar trip reports on his home page at https://timonoko.github.io/ https://timonoko.github.io/. In the 1992 report (in Finnish) he already says that the tide chart and vhf radio are must haves. At least he wasn't too stubborn.

walrus01 9y ago

One of the definitions of maturity is knowing when you're in over your head and to consult third party experts. Being intelligent in an abstract sense doesn't magically impart knowledge/training/skills in a field that a person has no direct experience in. For example I have no clue how to sail a sailboat, so if somebody gave me a 30' Catalina tomorrow I would go out and get training on how to sail before trying to discover the techniques from first principles. Watching the British Columbian news for the past 25 years - I could find probably at least twenty instances where random tourists go off into the back country and are never seen again, or are found deceased in a ravine years later by random hikers. You can die in the North Shore mountains within 10 km of North Vancouver pretty easily. Search and rescue missions are a fairly common thing in tourist season. Thankfully boating and kayaking has a bit more equipment/preparation barrier (compared to just heading off into the woods with no map, no GPS, a few Clif bars, wearing sandals, a tiny water bottle and no jacket) so maritime search and rescue is not as common.

ilkkao 9y ago

The author has many other similar trip reports on his home page at https://timonoko.github.io/ https://timonoko.github.io/. In the 1992 report (in Finnish) he already says that the tide chart and vhf radio are must haves. At least he wasn't too stubborn.